


Simple Mathematics

by trace_of_scarlet



Category: Marvel (Movies), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, POV Female Character, POV Third Person, slashy if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-08
Updated: 2012-07-08
Packaged: 2017-11-09 11:21:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/454885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trace_of_scarlet/pseuds/trace_of_scarlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha character-study. She’s got red in her ledger, and she’ll <i>never</i> wipe it all out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Simple Mathematics

**Author's Note:**

> Set post-Avengers; semi-spoilery but not particularly so.

She thinks: I have never been so tired, and knows it is a lie. She _has_ been this tired before, in Russia, in the Red Room, for fourteen years. But in all the time she has been Natasha Romanoff, not Nataliya Romanova, she has never, ever been this tired.

Is this enough? she thinks. Has she done enough? She has been dreaming of the fire in the hospital again, the fire which destroyed all her records and nearly two hundred human lives – and those are only the tip of the iceberg. She remembers every life she has ever taken, in her work for the Red Room and in her work for herself, and one night is never enough to dream about all of them. She told the truth when she told Clint she was compromised, but lying by omission when she allowed him to assume the fault was Loki’s. She has, in fact, been compromised ever since she permitted herself to believe Clint’s claim that she was redeemable, and thus to consider what redemption entails. So she has now saved the world (or at least she has helped to); how many lives is that worth? If she saves the lives of one hundred New Yorkers, is that equal to that of fifty Hungarians? Or seventy? Are they equivalent? The calculation confuses her – it would never have been considered appropriate in the Red Room, where all that she broke was broken for the good of Mother Russia, and thus sanctified – and yet she finds that it obsesses her, too. If Clint and Coulson believe that she is a good person then it is her duty to accomplish that goal, to unmake herself one last time and coalesce into a creation of her own design and her own choosing. This time, for this mission, she must be her own Red Room.

Perhaps, she thinks, she has the equation all wrong: she may be making the sum too complex, too algebraic. Few things are as simple as the taking or the giving of a human life; surely, then, the mathematics of her own redemption must be equally simple. Perhaps it is, in fact, _too_ simple: perhaps the red in her ledger has been written there in permanent ink on pages of vellum. And yet. And yet.

It is not in her nature (or her training) to refuse a target: to wail and whine and simper that it is too hard is the action of a child, not of a woman. She will continue; she will try to succeed even if success is impossible. After all, she thinks (and smiles faintly), once upon a time a man surviving sixty years under polar ice would have been considered impossible too. Once upon a time her life was simple and contained no mathematics, only the breath-taking physics of all that she was capable of.

And yet. Perhaps this will be her own form of counting sheep (Clint, she knows, soothes himself to sleep by repeating the six times table to himself over and over), for she finds that in the aftermath of the Battle of New York, she does not dream her murders again.


End file.
